On a sunny Sat­urday morn­ing in early March, Bob Vander Plaats walked in­to the West Des Moines Mar­ri­ott with a chip on his shoulder. Iowa’s evan­gel­ic­al shot-caller had come to meet with Wis­con­sin Gov. Scott Walk­er, who was in town for the Iowa Ag Sum­mit, a cattle call that drew the ma­jor­ity of Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial hope­fuls. Over the course of the week­end, Vander Plaats had sit-downs sched­uled with just about all of them. But not Jeb Bush.

A twice-failed gubernat­ori­al can­did­ate who helped boost Mike Hucka­bee to vic­tory in the 2008 caucuses, Vander Plaats has grown ac­cus­tomed to pres­id­en­tial as­pir­ants lin­ing up to kiss his ring, and his group, the Fam­ily Lead­er, has yet to choose a can­did­ate for 2016. But when Bush’s team planned the former Flor­ida gov­ernor’s first trip to Iowa in 15 years, no time was set aside for Vander Plaats—or for any of Iowa’s oth­er prom­in­ent Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives. The snub had left Vander Plaats stew­ing.

So who did he see when he walked in­to the Mar­ri­ott lobby on Sat­urday morn­ing? Bush him­self—ac­com­pan­ied by Dav­id Kochel, the long­time Iowa Re­pub­lic­an strategist who’s been tapped to run Bush’s na­tion­al cam­paign. Kochel leaned over to the can­did­ate, and after a nod and a whis­per, the two sprung up and made a beeline for Vander Plaats.

“I would not say it was awk­ward,” Vander Plaats re­calls, a trace of mis­chiev­ous­ness in his voice. “I would say it was ‘Iowa hos­pit­able.’ “Š” He and Bush chat­ted cas­u­ally for about 10 minutes, he re­calls, steer­ing clear of thorny sub­jects and en­ga­ging in some farm­ing banter. Bush, whom Vander Plaats says was “very, very gra­cious,” prom­ised to keep in touch. That struck Vander Plaats as a throwaway line, noth­ing more than a pleas­ant way of end­ing the con­ver­sa­tion. But over the fol­low­ing week, Bush’s team, at the can­did­ate’s be­hest, did fol­low up, mul­tiple times. Bush asked Vander Plaats to ar­range a private meet­ing with his evan­gel­ic­al al­lies in Iowa; Vander Plaats con­sen­ted, on the con­di­tion that Bush also speak pub­licly at a Fam­ily Lead­er func­tion. While Bush’s team has not yet com­mit­ted to that, Vander Plaats is con­fid­ent that Bush will be back in Iowa some­time this year for both pub­lic and private vet­ting ses­sions with the state’s lead­ing so­cial con­ser­vat­ives. (Bush de­clined to com­ment for this story.)

The epis­ode spot­lighted, in mini­ature, the com­plic­ated re­la­tion­ship that Bush has with con­ser­vat­ive Chris­ti­ans. The same voters who fam­ously provided the “ground troops” for George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 vic­tor­ies are, thus far, look­ing askance at his broth­er, see­ing him as a clas­sic, feck­less “mod­er­ate” Re­pub­lic­an in the mold of John Mc­Cain and Mitt Rom­ney. That could present a ma­jor road­b­lock to the nom­in­a­tion, since fully half of Re­pub­lic­an primary voters are evan­gel­ic­als, and the num­ber is even high­er in the key early states of Iowa and South Car­o­lina. Among white, born-again Iowa evan­gel­ic­als, 27 per­cent said in a re­cent Quin­nipi­ac poll that they def­in­itely wouldn’t vote for Bush—ty­ing him with Chris Christie for that group’s low­est seal of ap­prov­al. Their skep­ti­cism to­ward Bush is a big reas­on why he cur­rently polls in fifth place in the state.

And yet, Bush is hardly a stranger to the world of re­li­gious con­ser­vat­ism. In his two terms as Flor­ida gov­ernor, he was a fe­ro­cious—and some­times con­tro­ver­sial—cham­pi­on for life and tra­di­tion­al fam­il­ies, com­pil­ing a re­cord of so­cially con­ser­vat­ive gov­ernance that none of his Re­pub­lic­an foes can match. “As it relates to mak­ing de­cisions as a pub­lic lead­er, one’s faith should guide you,” Bush said in 2009. “That’s not to say that every de­cision I made would be com­pletely in keep­ing with the teach­ings of the Cath­ol­ic Church, but it was a guide­post that kept me out of trouble.”

Among con­ser­vat­ive Chris­ti­an lead­ers, Bush in­spires wildly dif­fer­ent re­ac­tions—from deeply dis­trust­ful to nearly wor­ship­ful. Tony Per­kins, who heads the in­flu­en­tial Fam­ily Re­search Coun­cil, says that some of Bush’s mod­er­ate stances (on im­mig­ra­tion and edu­ca­tion, for in­stance) show his in­clin­a­tion to “dig in and stick a fin­ger in the eye” of con­ser­vat­ives. Yet there is also a camp of more prag­mat­ic evan­gel­ic­al and Cath­ol­ic lead­ers who are any­thing but hos­tile to Bush. In fact, they’ve taken turns meet­ing with the former gov­ernor over the past year and are pos­it­ively smit­ten with him.

How to re­con­cile these ver­sions of Bush—the one who is viewed war­ily by so­cially con­ser­vat­ive voters even as he em­braces many of their causes, the one who turns off some evan­gel­ic­al lead­ers and im­presses oth­ers, the one who both snubbed and reached out to Vander Plaats? Part of the an­swer may be that Bush—who is seen by friends and fam­ily as a clas­sic in­tro­vert—simply doesn’t wear his faith on his sleeve. And part of it may be shrewd polit­ics: The man who fam­ously said that a Re­pub­lic­an must be will­ing to “lose the primary to win the gen­er­al” in 2016 wants to court re­li­gious voters without tak­ing the kinds of hard-line stands that could hurt him in the gen­er­al elec­tion. He knows that woo­ing the evan­gel­ic­al base gen­er­ally in­volves talk­ing (and talk­ing some more) about po­lar­iz­ing is­sues—abor­tion, con­tra­cep­tion, and same-sex mar­riage, to name a few—in ways that risk ali­en­at­ing the broad­er elect­or­ate come Novem­ber. Bush wants to avoid that. But he also needs Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives’ votes to get to Novem­ber in the first place.

It has all landed Bush in a strange, prob­ably un­pre­ced­en­ted, spot: He’s a nat­ur­al can­did­ate of re­li­gious con­ser­vat­ives who’s so far be­ing over­looked by that in­flu­en­tial vot­ing bloc. Bush wants Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives to pay at­ten­tion to what he’s done, not just to what he says. But in a Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial primary, can ac­tions—much less ac­tions more than a dec­ade in the past—ac­tu­ally speak louder than words? Can quiet faith, and quiet sup­port from some re­li­gious lead­ers, carry the day against a field full of out­spoken Chris­ti­an war­ri­ors?

BE­FORE HE WON two terms as gov­ernor, be­fore his broth­er won two terms as pres­id­ent, be­fore he con­sidered his own 2016 White House bid, Jeb Bush lost his first polit­ic­al race. It was 1994, and Bush ran, in his words, as a “head-banging con­ser­vat­ive” in a bruis­ing cam­paign against Demo­crat­ic Gov. Law­ton Chiles. On the stump, when asked what he would do for Flor­ida’s black voters, Bush said, “Prob­ably noth­ing.” He ran ads ac­cus­ing his op­pon­ent of not ex­ecut­ing death-row in­mates fast enough. He put out reams of far-right policy pa­pers and re­cruited an ul­tracon­ser­vat­ive state le­gis­lat­or as his run­ning mate. But that fall, in a Re­pub­lic­an wave elec­tion that saw his older broth­er knock off a Demo­crat­ic gov­ernor in Texas, Bush lost an ag­on­iz­ingly close con­test by less than 2 per­cent­age points.

He took it hard. “I al­ways say when you lose a race by 13 points, you can sleep soundly, be­cause there’s noth­ing you could have done to change it,” says Mac Stipan­ovich, a GOP op­er­at­ive who ad­vised Bush’s first cam­paign. “When you lose a race that close, you can al­most nev­er sleep again. Al­most any­thing you could have done would have changed it.”

Bush felt he was com­ing up short at home, too. Long hours and 18 months on the cam­paign trail had taken him away from his wife and three chil­dren, and his mar­riage of 20 years was strug­gling. One of his chil­dren was get­ting in­to trouble. Al­ways prone to in­tro­spec­tion, he began to search for where he’d gone wrong. In an ef­fort to re­group and re­con­nect with his fam­ily, he turned to the Cath­ol­ic faith of his wife. Cath­oli­cism had been part of Bush’s life since 1974, when he mar­ried Columba Gar­nica de Gallo in the Uni­versity Cath­ol­ic Cen­ter at the Uni­versity of Texas at Aus­tin. They wanted the fam­ily to share a re­li­gious tra­di­tion, and their chil­dren were brought up Cath­ol­ic, with Bush of­ten at­tend­ing Mass. But he’d nev­er form­ally con­ver­ted from his Epis­copal roots.

Two weeks after his de­feat, Bush went to Miami’s Church of the Epi­phany and began the Cath­ol­ic Rite of Chris­ti­an Ini­ti­ation of Adults—a months-long pro­cess that re­quired him to go to con­fes­sion, find a spon­sor, and at­tend weekly courses on church doc­trine and prac­tice. He later told a Flor­ida Cath­ol­ic news­pa­per that the pro­cess al­lowed him “to take some time to pause and re­flect”; this wasn’t the kind of dra­mat­ic, “I was blind, but now I see” con­ver­sion that his broth­er had ex­per­i­enced. On East­er week­end of 1995, Bush was form­ally re­ceived in­to the Ro­man Cath­ol­ic Church. In the years since, he has said that he finds the tra­di­tion’s sac­ra­ments com­fort­ing and that his “faith was strengthened when I con­ver­ted to my wife’s faith.” Between his first two cam­paigns, Bush con­tin­ued his pre­vi­ous work in real es­tate, but he also helped start a charter school in a strug­gling Miami neigh­bor­hood. He cowrote a book, Pro­files in Char­ac­ter, which cribbed its title and premise from Pro­files in Cour­age, the Pulitzer Prize—win­ning work of Amer­ica’s only Cath­ol­ic pres­id­ent, John Kennedy. Bush ded­ic­ated the book to his fam­ily, and “to God, whose di­vine and guid­ing light is the ul­ti­mate means to vir­tue.”

“I think he grew spir­itu­ally in that dec­ade of the ‘90s,” says Al Carde­n­as, the former Amer­ic­an Con­ser­vat­ive Uni­on chair­man who has known Bush for al­most four dec­ades. “It made him a bet­ter hus­band and dad. I saw that be­fore my very eyes.”

It also made him a dif­fer­ent politi­cian. When he tried again for gov­ernor in 1998, Bush was no longer the same com­bat­ive, even angry, can­did­ate he’d been four years earli­er. His stances had changed little, but his tone was softer, his out­look more—well—com­pas­sion­ate. Bush ex­plained to a St. Peters­burg Times re­port­er that his Cath­ol­ic com­mit­ment changed the ten­or of his cam­paign­ing. “It’s softened it in the sense that it is a po­s­i­tion of love, not of in­tol­er­ance,” he said. “It is a deep­er be­lief about the value and sanc­tity of life it­self.” This time, he cam­paigned vig­or­ously in black churches. He talked of his con­ver­sion and caring for the poor. “He cer­tainly was a dif­fer­ent can­did­ate, but he seemed to some de­gree to be a dif­fer­ent per­son as well,” says Au­brey Jew­ett, a polit­ic­al-sci­ence pro­fess­or at the Uni­versity of Cent­ral Flor­ida. He won eas­ily, by 11 per­cent­age points. At Bush’s in­aug­ur­a­tion, the Rev. Billy Gra­ham prayed that the new gov­ernor would lead Flor­ida in “a mor­al and spir­itu­al awaken­ing.”

Gov. Bush seemed bent on do­ing just that, and in the pro­cess, he pi­on­eered new ways to in­fuse Chris­ti­an faith in­to state gov­ern­ment. “Jeb con­nec­ted his mor­al and re­li­gious be­liefs to his pub­lic policies more openly than a lot of people,” says Mat­thew Cor­rigan, a polit­ic­al-sci­ence pro­fess­or at the Uni­versity of North Flor­ida. Nowhere was this more evid­ent than in his pro-life work. (Bush would later tell the Chris­ti­an Broad­cast­ing Net­work that his faith in­formed him about “the dig­nity of life more than any­thing else.”) Dur­ing his first year in of­fice, he made good on a cam­paign prom­ise, sign­ing in­to law a con­tro­ver­sial bill that cre­ated “Choose Life” li­cense plates whose pro­ceeds be­nefited crisis-preg­nancy cen­ters that en­cour­aged wo­men to choose ad­op­tion over abor­tion. Bush went on to push for a “par­tial-birth” abor­tion ban, and for le­gis­la­tion re­quir­ing doc­tors to no­ti­fy the par­ents of girls un­der 18 at least two days be­fore an abor­tion pro­ced­ure. He signed both laws, but they were blocked by courts. Sub­sequently, however, Bush and con­ser­vat­ive law­makers got par­ent­al no­ti­fic­a­tion on the state bal­lot, and voters changed the Flor­ida con­sti­tu­tion to al­low it to go for­ward. The gov­ernor hap­pily signed par­ent­al no­ti­fic­a­tion in­to law in 2005.

Bush cam­paigns with his par­ents dur­ing his “head-banging” bid for Flor­ida gov­ernor in 1994; after his loss, he con­ver­ted to Cath­oli­cism. (Joe Burb­ank/Or­lando Sen­tinel/MCT)

Bush was not averse to de­vi­at­ing from Cath­ol­ic doc­trine at times. He sup­por­ted the death pen­alty, des­pite sus­tained lob­by­ing from Cath­ol­ic bish­ops. His pro-busi­ness policies were a far cry from the papacy’s blis­ter­ing cri­tiques of cap­it­al­ism, though they lined up neatly with those of most Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives in the United States. (More re­cently, Bush, who has been known to tweet praise for Pope Fran­cis, has pub­licly cri­ti­cized the U.S. deal with Cuba, which the pontiff helped broker.) Former col­leagues and staffers say the gov­ernor was private about his Cath­oli­cism on the job, but the signs were there—in the ros­ary he was known to carry, or in the Bible he kept in his second of­fice, where he did most of his work. State Rep. Den­nis Bax­ley, the dean of the Flor­ida Le­gis­lature’s so­cial con­ser­vat­ives, took com­fort in the fact that Bush’s Bible was usu­ally open at a dif­fer­ent chapter and verse each time he vis­ited. “It was used,” he says. “It wasn’t a dec­or­a­tion.”

In­deed, Flor­ida’s faith com­munity could find little fault with Bush as gov­ernor. His great am­bi­tion was to leave a last­ing mark on edu­ca­tion, and he de­lighted so­cial con­ser­vat­ives by cham­pi­on­ing school choice. He cre­ated the coun­try’s first statewide vouch­er sys­tem, des­pite leg­al chal­lenges and heavy cri­ti­cism from the ACLU and oth­er cham­pi­ons of church-state sep­ar­a­tion. (Part of the ori­gin­al plan was de­clared un­con­sti­tu­tion­al, and re­booted as a tax-cred­it pro­gram.) After his broth­er opened the White House Of­fice of Faith-Based and Com­munity Ini­ti­at­ives, Jeb cre­ated a sim­il­ar board at the state level. He also con­ver­ted three cor­rec­tion­al fa­cil­it­ies in­to faith-based pris­ons—the first of their kind in the na­tion—that used re­li­gious pro­grams to pro­mote re­hab­il­it­a­tion. And whenev­er he made a key ap­point­ment, it seemed, Bush turned to prom­in­ent so­cial con­ser­vat­ives. He tapped Pa­tri­cia Levesque, a gradu­ate of the fun­da­ment­al­ist Bob Jones Uni­versity, as his edu­ca­tion ad­viser (she still leads his two edu­ca­tion non­profits). He ap­poin­ted Bob Brooks, a state law­maker and phys­i­cian well-known for op­pos­ing abor­tion and ho­mo­sexu­al­ity, to serve as Flor­ida’s health sec­ret­ary. The first pres­id­ent of the Fam­ily Re­search Coun­cil, a main­stay of the Chris­ti­an Right lobby in Wash­ing­ton, headed Bush’s De­part­ment of Chil­dren and Fam­il­ies. Prom­in­ent act­iv­ists from Fo­cus on the Fam­ily and the Liberty Coun­sel (a con­ser­vat­ive Chris­ti­an law firm) were placed on the state nom­in­at­ing com­mis­sions that re­com­mend judges for the gov­ernor to ap­point.

But it was the strange case of Terri Schiavo where Bush’s faith emerged most pub­licly. By the time the Schiavo con­tro­versy hit the news, Bush had already shown an in­clin­a­tion to use his of­fice to in­ter­vene in in­di­vidu­al cases when he saw a mor­al im­per­at­ive at stake. In 2003, after a de­vel­op­ment­ally dis­abled wo­man was raped at a state-li­censed fa­cil­ity, be­com­ing preg­nant, Jeb asked that the fetus—in ad­di­tion to the wo­man—be giv­en a leg­al guard­i­an for pro­tec­tion. His re­quest was denied by a judge. Two years later, his ad­min­is­tra­tion tried to stop an­oth­er ward of the state, a 13-year-old girl, from hav­ing an abor­tion. “It was es­sen­tially tan­tamount to for­cing chil­dren to have chil­dren,” says Howard Si­mon, the dir­ect­or of the Flor­ida ACLU, which helped rep­res­ent the girl. (She was ul­ti­mately al­lowed to ter­min­ate her preg­nancy.)

The struggle over Schiavo, a young wo­man who had been in a ve­get­at­ive state since col­lapsing in 1990, had been on­go­ing for more than a dec­ade when Bush got in­volved. The dis­pute pit­ted her par­ents, who wanted to keep her alive, against her hus­band, who wanted to re­move her from life sup­port. The gov­ernor entered the fray in 2003, and for nearly two years, he would fight on her par­ents’ side in one of the most ac­ri­mo­ni­ous end-of-life cases in U.S. his­tory. When a judge ruled that Schiavo’s feed­ing tube could be re­moved, Bush pushed the state Le­gis­lature to pass a law that gave him the au­thor­ity to have the tube re­in­ser­ted. When that law was struck down, he ap­pealed. When he lost that ap­peal, he took his case to the U.S. Su­preme Court, which de­clined to hear it. Bush then reached out to his broth­er and to Con­gress, which voted to al­low Schiavo’s par­ents to again ap­peal the case—a pe­ti­tion that courts quickly denied.

Where some saw a gross over­reach of state power in­to cit­izens’ most private de­cisions—and most Flor­idi­ans, like most Amer­ic­ans, dis­ap­proved of the way the situ­ation was handled—pro-life Chris­ti­ans saw a hero­ic ef­fort. “Here’s a man who wanted to err on the side of life, and he gave it his all,” says Mike Mc­Car­ron, who was spokes­man for the Flor­ida Cath­ol­ic bish­ops while Bush was in of­fice. “If he be­lieved in something, he would do everything he could.” Ul­ti­mately, Bush couldn’t keep Schiavo alive; she died on March 31, 2005. But un­like many mem­bers of Con­gress, who have openly re­gret­ted their in­volve­ment in the Schiavo af­fair, Bush has stead­fastly de­fen­ded his ac­tions. “This was a vis­ion that was cost­ing him polit­ic­al cap­it­al,” says Ken Con­nor, an an­ti­abor­tion act­iv­ist and law­yer who rep­res­en­ted the gov­ernor in the case. “But he nev­er ex­pressed any­thing oth­er than com­pas­sion and that he and the gov­ern­ment had a re­spons­ib­il­ity.”

By the end of his eight years as gov­ernor, Bush had cre­ated a new mod­el for faith-based gov­ern­ing—one that was over­whelm­ingly pop­u­lar, ac­cord­ing to polls at the time, with evan­gel­ic­als in Flor­ida. But while many Amer­ic­ans still re­mem­ber the Schiavo con­tro­versy, Bush’s as­so­ci­ation with Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ism has faded in the years since he left of­fice. And even when he was gov­ernor, he was cau­tious about trum­pet­ing his Cath­ol­ic con­vic­tions. “Let me put it this way: I saw him in the back of the church a lot,” says Mc­Car­ron, who at­ten­ded Mass reg­u­larly with Bush in Tal­l­a­hassee. “His re­li­gious val­ues over­lapped with his polit­ic­al and per­son­al val­ues. But I don’t re­call an in­stance where he pub­licly said any­thing about it. He wouldn’t back away from [his faith] for a second. But by the same token, he’s just not go­ing to lead with that.”

More than a dec­ade later, sur­roun­ded by Re­pub­lic­an rivals shout­ing their testi­mon­ies and tea-party plat­forms from the rooftops, Bush’s re­cord seems to count for little. “He’s not talk­ing about life. He’s not talk­ing about fam­ily. He’s not talk­ing about re­li­gious liberty. And those are our core is­sues,” says John Stem­ber­ger, a former Bush ap­pointee who is the pres­id­ent of the Flor­ida Fam­ily Policy Coun­cil. “Yeah, he’ll an­swer a ques­tion. That’s what he’ll do. But he’s not cham­pi­on­ing any of our is­sues. So our view is this: Why would we pick Jeb, when we’ve got five oth­er cham­pi­ons on our is­sues?”

THE SUN HAD not yet ris­en over South Beach when Mark DeMoss strolled onto the first tee at the Bilt­more Coun­try Club in March 2014 for a round with Flor­ida’s former gov­ernor. DeMoss, a pub­lic-re­la­tions guru who has rep­res­en­ted some of Amer­ica’s fore­most Chris­ti­an lead­ers and groups, served as Mitt Rom­ney’s “evan­gel­ic­al whisper­er” in 2008 and 2012, in­tro­du­cing the Mor­mon can­did­ate to in­flu­en­tial Chris­ti­an audi­ences, vouch­ing for his val­ues, and set­ting up a much-pub­li­cized meet­ing with the Rev. Billy Gra­ham. Now, after nearly six years at Rom­ney’s side, DeMoss was mov­ing on, eager to eval­u­ate po­ten­tial can­did­ates and see if any of them was worth sup­port­ing. First on his list was Bush, whom he’d nev­er met. Know­ing that he would soon be head­ing to Flor­ida on a fam­ily va­ca­tion, DeMoss had asked a mu­tu­al friend if a brief meet­ing could be ar­ranged—maybe a half-hour? A week later, he found him­self spend­ing an ex­ten­ded, leis­urely morn­ing with the po­ten­tial can­did­ate.

DeMoss didn’t know what to ex­pect. What he got was hours of cas­u­al con­ver­sa­tion with someone whose mind—and mouth—nev­er stood still. “He talked while he played, talked while he putted. You can’t mess up his con­cen­tra­tion,” DeMoss says. The dia­logue con­tin­ued after 18 holes with an un­hur­ried brunch. Over egg whites, oat­meal, and cof­fee, Bush talked about his fam­ily, his re­cord in Flor­ida, and his thoughts about the pres­id­en­tial bid he was pon­der­ing. If he ran, Bush said, he wanted to do so “joy­fully,” to “lift peoples’ spir­its” and preach op­tim­ism. “He was talk­ing about tack­ling some really tough is­sues in a thought­ful and sub­stant­ive way,” DeMoss re­calls.

One thing nev­er came up: re­li­gion. Not once did Bush, in the course of a half-day spent with one of the polit­ic­al world’s most in­flu­en­tial evan­gel­ic­al am­bas­sad­ors, bring up his faith. Neither did DeMoss. But there was no need, he says: Everything Bush was say­ing and do­ing seemed in­formed by the core val­ues that DeMoss was look­ing for. By the time brunch was done, DeMoss’s mind was made up. No need to vis­it with oth­er can­did­ates. “I told him then that I’d help him or nobody,” DeMoss re­calls. (He is now work­ing un­of­fi­cially on Bush’s be­half, help­ing to co­ordin­ate faith-based out­reach and do­ing “whatever they want me to do,” he says.)

DeMoss is hardly alone: In fact, power­ful Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives are op­er­at­ing what amounts to a stealth cam­paign on Bush’s be­half. Some are old al­lies from the Flor­ida days; oth­ers are hol­d­overs from George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 cam­paigns. Some are both, in­clud­ing Ral­ph Reed, pres­id­ent of the Faith and Free­dom Co­ali­tion, a long­time friend of Jeb’s who served as South­east re­gion­al chair­man of George W.’s 2004 reelec­tion ef­fort (and thus prac­tic­ally lived in Flor­ida). Mul­tiple GOP sources say that Reed has been ur­ging Jeb Bush for sev­er­al years to make a 2016 run and spoke with him re­cently to game out the cam­paign. Like many of the or­gan­iz­a­tions that Bush’s sup­port­ers lead, Reed’s co­ali­tion de­mands im­par­ti­al­ity from its lead­ers, so Reed can’t openly back his man—un­less, as some sus­pect will hap­pen, Reed ul­ti­mately de­cides to join the cam­paign of­fi­cially. (Reed de­clined to com­ment for this story.)

While the can­did­ate isn’t hit­ting the hust­ings to woo rank-and-file Chris­ti­an voters, he’s been busy sur­repti­tiously build­ing a for­mid­able co­ali­tion of so­cially con­ser­vat­ive lu­minar­ies. Last sum­mer, Bush flew to Col­or­ado for a private lunch­eon with the brass of Fo­cus on the Fam­ily. Sev­er­al of Amer­ica’s best-con­nec­ted evan­gel­ic­als broke bread with Bush, in­clud­ing Jim Daly, Fo­cus’s pres­id­ent, whose ra­dio pro­gram reaches a large, loy­al audi­ence, and Tim Goeg­lein, who was the faith li­ais­on in George W. Bush’s White House. People fa­mil­i­ar with the meet­ing—and un­af­fili­ated with Bush—say the former gov­ernor made a strik­ing im­pres­sion, one that echoed through the up­per­most ech­el­ons of the evan­gel­ic­al world. (Neither Daly nor Goeg­lein would com­ment.)

Bush also met last sum­mer with Rus­sell Moore, pres­id­ent of the Eth­ics and Re­li­gious Liberty Com­mis­sion of the South­ern Baptist Con­ven­tion. It was an all-day af­fair, Moore says, in which faith was a prime top­ic. Bush shared his per­son­al faith jour­ney; the two prayed to­geth­er, talked about is­sues of ur­gency to evan­gel­ic­als—re­li­gious liber­ties in par­tic­u­lar—and bon­ded over their love of C.”ŠS. Lewis. Moore, who pre­vi­ously had no re­la­tion­ship with Bush, says he came away awe­struck. “He was re­mark­ably en­gaged in­tel­lec­tu­ally,” Moore says, and “able to talk about a gamut of is­sues with ex­traordin­ary de­tail “… and not just the is­sues you’d ex­pect a pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate to be aware of.” Bush wowed Moore by ap­pear­ing to know the names of pas­tors at “any giv­en church” in Flor­ida. Most im­port­ant, though, he con­vinced Moore that he was a true so­cial con­ser­vat­ive. “There have been those, over the past year, that have sug­ges­ted that Gov­ernor Bush is some kind of Jon Hunts­man when it comes to so­cial is­sues,” Moore says. “And that’s one of the things I wanted to find out. And it’s just not the case.”

Bush has con­tin­ued schedul­ing time with Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ive lead­ers. In Feb­ru­ary, he met with Per­kins dur­ing the Con­ser­vat­ive Polit­ic­al Ac­tion Con­fer­ence. Bush’s PAC also re­cently hired a seni­or ad­viser, Jordan Seku­low, who is an out­spoken foe of same-sex mar­riage and who dir­ects the Amer­ic­an Cen­ter for Law and Justice, the con­ser­vat­ive counter to the ACLU.

“Jeb may have Je­sus in his heart,” says one ob­serv­er, “but the Gos­pel isn’t on his lips so far, and re­li­gious voters want that.”

To woo Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives, Bush will have to do more than re­mind them that he was a trail­blazer for school choice in Flor­ida; he’ll also have to get up to speed on is­sues that wer­en’t dom­in­at­ing the agenda when he was gov­ernor—Obama-care’s con­tra­cep­tion cov­er­age man­date, for in­stance, and re­li­gious liberty con­cerns such as wheth­er busi­ness own­ers can de­cline to serve LGBT cus­tom­ers or re­fuse to hire openly gay em­ploy­ees. In this en­deavor, his old friend Jim Towey will be a key as­set. When Bush first ran for gov­ernor in 1994, Towey was on the oth­er side, serving as Gov. Chiles’s dir­ect­or of Flor­ida’s Health and Hu­man Ser­vices agency. The loss that sparked Bush’s con­ver­sion led to an after-elec­tion lunch with Towey, a re­l­at­ive stranger but also a high-pro­file Cath­ol­ic whose brain Bush was eager to pick. The two quickly be­came the closest of friends, and that friend­ship, in turn, led to Towey’s ap­point­ment as the second dir­ect­or of George W. Bush’s faith-based ini­ti­at­ives. Towey is now pres­id­ent of Miami’s Ave Maria Uni­versity, one of the na­tion’s fore­most in­cub­at­ors of con­ser­vat­ive Cath­ol­ic doc­trine, while serving un­of­fi­cially as Bush’s point man for re­li­gious out­reach.

“He’s really, really im­port­ant—be­cause of his long-stand­ing per­son­al re­la­tion­ship with the gov­ernor, and be­cause he’s pres­id­ent of Ave Maria, so he gets the HHS man­date and the oth­er things evan­gel­ic­als are con­cerned about,” Moore says. “People say [Bush] hasn’t run since 2002, and that he doesn’t un­der­stand the cur­rent is­sues. Yes, he does—be­cause he’s got Jim Towey work­ing with him.”

Towey is co­ordin­at­ing an ex­clus­ive, in­vit­a­tion-only sum­mit between Bush and a bold­face roster of Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives; the de­tails are still be­ing worked out, but the meet­ing is ex­pec­ted to oc­cur in the next few months. Towey ex­pects it will un­der­score Bush’s strength with so­cially con­ser­vat­ive movers and shakers. “I’ve talked with some of the most prom­in­ent Cath­ol­ics and evan­gel­ic­als in Amer­ica, and they’re with him,” Towey says. “If he’s in, they’re in.”

Bush’s friend knows it’s a tough­er sale at the grass­roots, where folks don’t know the man of faith he does. Towey re­calls, years ago, ar­ran­ging for Bush and his wife, Columba, to vis­it with Moth­er Teresa’s priest in the slums of Tijuana dur­ing a trip to Mex­ico. Col­leagues who were there later told Towey that the gov­ernor began weep­ing when he en­countered a des­ti­tute wo­man singing a hymn. It’s the kind of story, Towey says, that Bush him­self would nev­er tell—a reti­cence that con­trib­utes, he fears, to his repu­ta­tion of be­ing in­suf­fi­ciently fer­vent about his re­li­gion.

“Jeb is not so much in­ter­ested in talk­ing about God, but the ac­tions,” Towey says. “He is very much in­ter­ested in faith that’s lived out; he’s not so in­ter­ested in the theo-logy, as much as the theo­logy in ac­tion.” He points to a 2012 com­mence­ment ad­dress Bush gave at Ave Maria, in which he touched only peri­pher­ally on faith. “It was an in­ter­est­ing speech,” Towey says. “Here he is at a very Cath­ol­ic uni­versity, but he talked mostly about the value and im­port­ance of work. To Jeb, that’s spir­itu­ally rooted—that you go out and work, and do for oth­ers, and not be a spec­tat­or in life.”

TODAY BUSH IS an act­ive mem­ber of the Church of the Little Flower, near his home in af­flu­ent Cor­al Gables. The second-old­est par­ish in Miami-Dade County, the bust­ling, bi­lin­gual church of more than 3,000 fam­il­ies is full of in­flu­en­tial mem­bers. Bush’s priest, the Rev. Mi­chael Dav­is, de­scribes him as “gen­er­ously sup­port­ive of our par­ish.” Jeb and Columba like to wor­ship at the 10:30 a.m. Mass, the one with the full choir; re­cently, their grand­daugh­ter was bap­tized at the church. “He is a val­ued mem­ber of our com­munity,” Dav­is says. “I am de­lighted that he feels spir­itu­ally sup­por­ted here.”

Bush needs to show that side of him­self—the one who at­tends Mass, car­ries a ros­ary, and keeps a Bible in his of­fice; the one who is be­loved by people like Jim Towey—to Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives if he is to win them over. However, he ap­pears de­term­ined to do this on his own terms. For in­stance, he is skip­ping the Iowa Faith and Free­dom Co­ali­tion’s spring kick­off event on April 24—an all-day af­fair that is con­sidered man­dat­ory for any­one who hopes to win a mean­ing­ful slice of Iowa’s evan­gel­ic­al elect­or­ate. It’s an ab­sence made even more not­able by the fact that the co­ali­tion is run by Reed, Bush’s old pal and po­ten­tial ace in the hole with con­ser­vat­ive Chris­ti­ans. Steve Scheffler, pres­id­ent of the Faith and Free­dom Co­ali­tion’s Iowa chapter, was ini­tially dis­ap­poin­ted at Bush’s de­cision not to at­tend. But in the weeks since, he says, Bush’s team has reached out, re­peatedly, to nail down ar­range­ments for a very dif­fer­ent type of event—a get-to-know-you “house party” for Bush and evan­gel­ic­al act­iv­ists. It’s the same type of event Bush’s people are hop­ing to co­ordin­ate with Bob Vander Plaats and the Fam­ily Lead­er.

Scheffler thinks Bush’s ap­proach is fine—not every can­did­ate should ad­opt the faith-on-his-sleeve style of George W. Bush, he says, and it’s un­fair to push the com­par­is­on on Jeb. “I don’t think most Chris­ti­ans want their can­did­ates to come out and say, ‘I’m a com­mit­ted Chris­ti­an be­cause A, B, C, and D.’ It needs to be subtle. I don’t think Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives in Iowa ex­pect that from Bush, or even want that. A lot of it will be based on words and ac­tions, and how faith drives his ac­tions,” Scheffler says. “I don’t think Jeb Bush has to mim­ic what his broth­er did. You’ve got to be your­self, you know?”

Clearly, though, Bush be­ing him­self isn’t cut­ting it for many so­cial con­ser­vat­ives. The only way he can cap­ture their hearts and votes, some say, is to throw him­self in­to one of the hot cul­tur­al battles of the day—per­haps by vow­ing to veto the Em­ploy­ment Non-Dis­crim­in­a­tion Act, which would ban hir­ing on the basis of sexu­al ori­ent­a­tion or gender iden­tity, if it passes while he’s in the White House. The bill, which has passed the Sen­ate but stalled in the House, has be­come a flash point for so­cial con­ser­vat­ives who view it—like Obama­care—as one more way Wash­ing­ton might trample on the re­li­gious liber­ties of busi­ness own­ers. “Just that one thing would be enorm­ous,” says John Stem­ber­ger.

But de­cry­ing ENDA is pre­cisely the type of pickle that Bush doesn’t want to find him­self in. ENDA may be a mon­stros­ity in the minds of so­cial con­ser­vat­ives, but lash­ing out at the bill is hardly a re­cipe for cam­paign­ing “joy­fully.” Mod­er­ate and ma­jor Re­pub­lic­an donors are count­ing on Bush to tran­scend cul­ture-war di­vis­ive­ness and broaden the party’s ap­peal with young­er and minor­ity voters. In its early stages—and des­pite the fact that Bush op­poses same-sex mar­riage—his cam­paign has been re­mark­ably gay-friendly, at least in a Re­pub­lic­an con­text. Mike Murphy, Bush’s Cali­for­nia-based chief strategist, fought to over­turn the state’s ban on same-sex mar­riage; Bush’s seni­or com­mu­nic­a­tions ad­viser, Tim Miller, is the most prom­in­ent openly gay op­er­at­ive in the mod­ern Re­pub­lic­an Party. Even with Seku­low’s re­cent hir­ing, the cam­paign is show­ing un­mis­tak­ably ecu­men­ic­al tend­en­cies.

Some so­cial con­ser­vat­ives warn that Bush’s fail­ure to speak out strongly on their is­sues could doom him in the gen­er­al elec­tion, be­cause evan­gel­ic­als won’t be mo­bil­ized to turn out. That is al­most cer­tainly an idle threat: If Bush sur­vives the primar­ies, there’s little doubt that Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ive voters will get be­hind him. Even Mitt Rom­ney’s Mor­mon­ism and one­time iden­tity as a cent­rist didn’t de­ter them in 2012—Rom­ney won as much sup­port from evan­gel­ic­al voters as George W. Bush did in 2004. Bush’s Cath­oli­cism will be no obstacle, either. The his­tor­ic­al mis­trust between evan­gel­ic­al Prot­est­ants and Cath­ol­ics is a dis­tant memory now, after dec­ades in which con­ser­vat­ives from both tra­di­tions have partnered on so­cial is­sues un­der a strategy known as “co-bel­li­ger­ency.” This year’s cycle will likely in­clude no few­er than five Cath­ol­ic con­tenders on the Re­pub­lic­an side—one of whom, Rick San­tor­um, rode the evan­gel­ic­al vote to vic­tory in the 2012 Iowa caucuses. “When I talk to evan­gel­ic­als about Jeb Bush, the fact that he’s Cath­ol­ic nev­er comes up,” says Rus­sell Moore. “Lit­er­ally, I have nev­er had an evan­gel­ic­al men­tion it.”

But Bush has oth­er obstacles to win­ning the con­ser­vat­ive Chris­ti­an votes that he needs to se­cure the Re­pub­lic­an nom­in­a­tion. “You have to have Je­sus in your heart and the Gos­pel on your lips,” says Henry Olsen of the Eth­ics and Pub­lic Policy Cen­ter, a con­ser­vat­ive think tank. “Jeb may have Je­sus in his heart, but the Gos­pel isn’t on his lips so far, and re­li­gious voters want that.”

His best bet, ac­cord­ing to sev­er­al re­li­gious and polit­ic­al thinkers, may be to roll out a time-worn strategy: Share the story of his faith, in a heart­felt way, to con­nect with val­ues voters. In Janu­ary, in the un­likely set­ting of an auto-deal­ers’ gath­er­ing in San Fran­cisco, Bush came as close to testi­fy­ing as he has so far in this cam­paign. Dur­ing the ques­tion-and-an­swer por­tion, after he had talked at great length about tax policy, Bush was asked what he does for fun. He loves Sundays, he said: “I don’t work on Sundays. I play golf really fast so that I can have break­fast really fast so I can go to Mass”—he paused—“slower.” The crowd laughed and he smiled, loosen­ing up a bit. “I can’t ask the priest to ac­cel­er­ate that. I prob­ably would if I could.” More laughter. “Please don’t tell Fath­er Dav­is—he would be very up­set that I said that.”

Then he got more ser­i­ous. “Bushes aren’t good about spill­ing our guts on things that are private,” he said. But he did—talk­ing about con­vert­ing to his wife’s Cath­oli­cism, how it strengthened his faith, and how it helped him as a gov­ernor and, now, as a pres­id­en­tial con­tender. “It gives me a serenity that, in a world of a lot of tur­bu­lence, is really im­port­ant,” he said. “There are views I have that are groun­ded in faith that really aren’t ne­go­ti­able. And it just sim­pli­fies things, par­tic­u­larly in pub­lic life, where you’re al­ways asked to modi­fy this and modi­fy that.” If faith drives you, he said, you stick to your guns. “Be­cause it’s more im­port­ant than polit­ics.”

COR­REC­TIONS: An earli­er ver­sion of this story mis­spelled Terri Schiavo’s name. In ad­di­tion, the art­icle ori­gin­ally stated that Marco Ru­bio wor­ships at the Church of the Little Flower when in Flor­ida. He is re­gistered at a dif­fer­ent church.

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